It started with two Chinese academics earlier this month saying Japan’s claims to the islands were nonsense and that Japan’s annexation of the Ryukyu kingdom in 1879 amounted to an invasion, with the sovereignty still open for debate.

The use of the word “sovereignty” is a real rib tickler that one. Are the Chinese planning on reinstalling the old ruling class and letting them go it alone?

Now, a Chinese general has tossed in his take.

Luo Yuan, a two-star general in the People’s Liberation Army, raised the territorial stakes again this week, saying the Ryukyus had started paying tribute to China in 1372, half a millennium before they were seized by Japan.

Yuan took a nice little stroll on the rhetorical tightrope:

“Let’s for now not discuss whether [the Ryukyus] belong to China, they were certainly China’s tributary state. I am not saying all former tributary states belong to China, but we can say with certainty that the Ryukyus do not belong to Japan.”

Perhaps the islands are just some outcropping in no man’s land and I should lay my claim for a little beachfront property while I can.

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Bloomberg has put together a well reported and extensive look at what appears to have been a 5-year long game of cat and mouse-hack and evade with servers containing some of the U.S. military’s most sensitive and highly-coveted technology.

If F-22’s and F-35’s start dropping out of the sky during the Asian apocalypse in the Taiwan Strait, now you know why.

Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.

Truly infuriating is that some managers at key defense contractors, operating under lax government supervision, basically decided to simply accept the presence of Chinese hackers in their systems.

My feeling is that if an attacker has been in your environment for years, your data is gone,” Wallisch wrote in an e-mail to a colleague in December 2010, a few weeks before HBGary itself was hacked and the record stops.

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Hey, if we put this flag here, there’s going to be no room for my villa!

Whatever your position on what belongs to who in the South China Sea dispute (“East Sea” in Vietnamese), you gotta give credit to China for their creative efforts in pushing their claim to the whole sea. Well, in their defense, not the whole thing, just around 80%.

China’s territorial claims have been infamously demarcated by what is referred to as the “Nine-Dotted Line” –which the Vietnamese call Đường lưỡi bò, “ox’s tongue line.”

I don’t want to go too deep into the history books on China’s claim, but some of it stems from the early 15th-century voyages of Chinese admiral Zheng He, the Muslim eunuch who, from 1405-1433, led several voyages as far as Africa’s Somali coast to highlight China’s status as super bad ass –the common term used before “super power.”

Had the new emperor not decided to re-focus resources on defending the northern borders and had be been able to resist paranoia about Chinese masses attaining too much knowledge, it is likely that Zheng He would have gone around the Horn of Africa before Vasca de Gama did in 1497 and we might all be speaking Chinese.

The Chinese “Treasure Ships” that Zheng He commanded dwarfed anything Europe had to offer and their support ships, which numbered in the hundreds, would have easily defeated a Spanish or Portuguese fleet had they been foolish enough to confront them.

There are scholarly disputes as to whether the Treasure Ships were huge or “very big”, but suffice it to say, China ruled the seas and the Europeans were probably lucky their less advanced technology hadn’t gotten them around the horn of Africa until the end of the century.

The Chinese “Treasure Ships” dwarfed anything Europe had to offer. There are scholarly disputes as to whether they were huge or “very big”, suffice it to say, China ruled the seas.

At any rate, aside of bullying its neighbors on the high seas these days with proxy fisherman, China is employing subtle approaches to getting the Nine-Dotted Line out there in the public eye.

There was the recent news of printing the lines in Chinese passports –which the Vietnamese and the Philippines refuse to stamp and in response are instead issuing visas on a separate piece of paper.

The passports were blatant, but China’s other tacts are a growing more and more nuanced. The Vietnamese media reported recently that Air China, the flagship carrier for the ROC, now shows the Nine-Dotted Line on the route map featured in their inflight magazine.

Not the greatest image, but you can see where the Nine Dotted Line is on those route line maps that keep me occupied in my seat for hours.

And if that weren’t enough, Chinese-made inflatable globes manufactured for resellers around the globe have shown up in Australia and the Philippines with the Nine-Dotted Line printed on them.

China, sneaking in the Nine-Dotted Line wherever they can. Even without customer’s knowing it.

Say what you will about Chinese government’s methods, but one things is beyond dispute: when they put their mind to something, they give it their all.

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Birth tourism and “maternity hotels” are an increasing problem as people take advantage of the American Constitution’s 14th Amendment and visa waver programs.

So you want that little bundle of joy your expecting to have U.S. citizenship do ya? All it takes is between $15,000 to $50,000 and a three-month stay in the States and baby-boom!, you’ve got yourself a little American.

And in true capitalist fashion companies have started offering package deals where expecting mothers can shack up in a “maternity hotel” offered by Koreans or Chinese entrepreneurs operating mostly in LA and New York.

According to authorities, the all-inclusive package covers airfare for the expecting mother, city tours, pre- and post-partum care, customized meals three times a day, maid services, and even English lessons for new moms.

But a slew of complaints has gotten the attention of U.S. law enforcement and the crackdown has begun.

While the primary target are Chinese and Koreans living in the States due to the large numbers participating in the scam, the practice is growing increasingly popular with Nigerian, Taiwanese and Turkish nationals according to one study.

Mexicans living and working in the States under work visas are also known to widely take advantage of the American Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which grants any child born on U.S. soil automatic citizenship. When those children turn 21 they then qualify for the “family reunification” statute which allows their family to petition for permanent residence –which most often is granted.

Just a few weeks back a Chinese-run mansion subdivided into 17 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms, was shut down for code enforcement violations –at the moment the only legal recourse available to authorities.

The front of one of the maternity hotels. Officials said they could not determine exactly how many women had been there and how many births took place.

Koreans reportedly run dozens of these facilities in Los Angeles and have recently come under increasing scrutiny by U.S. officials.

According to Kim, more than 20 expectant and new moms are currently housed in the unit where she has been working for the past two years.

“It’s a busy place. People constantly come and go,’’ she said, adding that some women stay on a tight two-month schedule, but most stay for three months, the allowed time in the U.S. under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP).

Following the closing of a “maternity hotel” last year in San Gabriel, California, a city inspector told a New York Times reporter:

These were not women living in squalor — it was a well taken care of place and clean, but there were a lot of women and babies,” said Clayton Anderson, a city inspector. “I have never seen anything like this before. We really couldn’t determine the exact number of people living there.

This could be another nail in the what could be the coffin of the Korea-U.S. Visa Waiver Program (VWP) agreed upon between the two countries a little over four years ago. The VWP has been criticized in recent years as a wave of Korean prostitutes and pimps using easy access to America to set up shop have caused great concern with both Korean and U.S. authorities.

Those who should perhaps be most concerned are the tens-of-thousands of Korean tourists who legally visit the United States every year thanks to the VWP.